


(not a) mask and blaster

by jedhaboy



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: 5+1, Developing or hinted at pairings, Drinking tea at two am on the kitchen floor is self care, Gen, Getting used to life outside of being a brainwashed foot soldier for an imperialist regime is hard, Pairing is background, Panic Attacks, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-28
Updated: 2017-08-28
Packaged: 2018-12-21 03:27:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11935353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jedhaboy/pseuds/jedhaboy
Summary: Bodhi knows Finn -- from the way he counts and times his breathing to the stretching and collapsing of his fingers when people talk to him, not at him, loud and all at once.  He knows the flinches, the pauses and shivers, the hesitation in teeth against a lower lip and the false bravado.  More than anything, he knows the blank hollowness that fills Finn's eyes when he has precious seconds to himself in this anthill base of the Resistance.  It’s like a reflection of himself.aka, five times Bodhi Rook was there for Finn as a new defector, and one time Finn was there for him.





	(not a) mask and blaster

**Author's Note:**

> I almost titled this 'Bodhi Rook is Finn's biggest stan' but decided that wasn't serious enough. 
> 
> This fic comes from the thought of 'what if Bodhi survived, and was there during Force Awakens to help Finn adjust to life outside of being a tool for the First Order.' Then it turned into a monster of words.

#### I.

In the wake of a half broken sunrise, Bodhi Rook runs his fingers over the datapad held against a palm of calluses and old, shiny scars. Lines of script form the names of pilots, starships, the power that they hold together in separate squadrons it’s own equation, far from the calamity of every ship as one. Like a beautiful disaster, a set of fireworks made of heat and death in the silhouettes of stars. He’s memorized the numbers before. When a squadron followed his orders not three days ago, straight into the center of enemy space and ripped a base into pieces with their bombs. 

There will always be blood in his mouth when he bites his tongue and waits for the reports to come in. Worry tastes like ash, and grows bitter when a pilot doesn’t come home with their team for the celebration, as meager as it may have to be. One is good, but one is still an ache. Bodhi stands in the shadow of Rogue’s second rebirth and sends a message out for a new ship, when available. A new pilot willing or capable. Ideally, both. 

He thinks, however briefly, that the perfect pilot is already nearby. An encroaching voice in his ears as greetings spill from those always grinning lips towards the tired and hungry of Rogue, muffled and sleep soaked as they slip him by. In the peripheral, a small glint of teeth. Then Poe Dameron takes up almost all of Bodhi’s vision, tall and strapped into a jacket one size too small for him and oddly well worn. 

“Did you borrow that from Pava?” he asks, lowering his datapad. 

Poe laughs, but offers no real explanation. It’s a tight sound that speaks to rumors Bodhi rarely has time for, still hears when they creep into his ears. What truth they have is written in the twitching fingers by Poe’s sides and his rolling shoulders. Soft vertebrae crack when he ducks beneath an X-wing’s broken wires, breathes in hard enough for his nostrils to flare.

“Listen, Admiral--”

Here, it’s Bodhi who has to fight a grin. 

“My friend is about to get out of medical. Today. And I don’t know what you’ve heard, but he’s like you.”

Bodhi asks, “Too fond of flying?” And revels in the blank, turned baffled stare it earns him.

“Uh. No. Actually, opposite, probably. No he’s -- he’s the one who helped me escape and defected. You know, the stormtrooper.” Poe says, his voice dropping on an instinct built on the others around him, not the person in his bones. “He’s tough, but he’s been through so much, and force knows I’m not the best person to give advice for his experiences.”

His hands open and close by his sides, before falling into half-curled fists that grow almost eerily still. It’s a slow moment. Caught in their own space, surrounded by the pilots and droids racing by in solos and pairs that form a static drumming noise. Poe exhales through his mouth and fixes Bodhi with a stare all too familiar.

“Could you talk to him when you have the chance?”

“Why not you?”

Poe’s mouth purses - it’s an odd expression for him, so full of joy - and half raises his shoulders. “I’m gonna be there for him, but it’s different. He doesn’t know many faces yet, and yours is a good one.”

Silence grows between them as Bodhi turns his gaze back to his datapad, and turns the system off. The stormtrooper, the defector. Who left to save a life and has been in medical since, stirring rumors as his spine was rebuilt with metal by tight lipped doctors, while all this rumors came from assisting nurses taking breaks in the canteen with nerves loosening their lips. Bodhi feels something in his belly curve and flutter. It stirs his hands into wanting the goggles strapped upon his head, or the tip of his braid where it brushes fabric and the skin beneath. 

After a moment, he brings himself steady. A defector, just like him. Something crawls beneath his skin, and Bodhi almost shivers. Perhaps not every wound has healed with time. But --

“You’re brazen, Poe.” He says, a softening in his eyes. “Which room is he in?”

##### \---

Some decades ago, as the shockwaves of Scarif rippled through the Alliance and stirred new forces to action, he lived through the weeks of chaos to come to in a sterile room with faint light through forehead high windows as his only comfort that this was no fever dream. No trick of the mind to try and cling to life for just a few moments more. Sometimes, Bodhi doubted the doctors who came and went with medical droids as their shadows or guides. Saw them and barely felt them - only knew the pain that they stirred with their wandering hands as real. 

The first to speak to him wore a pursed face as her droid mechanically listed body parts, burns, and percentages in a droning rhythm. Unbreaking even when he thought, just like Kay Too, and burst into laughter riding the wrong edge of hysterical. She waited, that doctor. Until Bodhi was choking down laughter and swallowing spit to help him lift the blanket away from his aching body. Thin, white shorts damp with the same nameless fluid (plasma, she’d tell him, plasma from your veins) that stained his blanket were his only chance at modesty. Every other inch of body shined in a way that made Bodhi feel sick. Almost unnatural, pink and pulled too thin over his legs, his hips, where his belly was coated in thicker bacta patches than all the rest. 

He hadn’t words, and she offered no explanation. Folding that blanket that felt of sand to the side before leaving in a flurry of white and the pounding of boots across stone floors. 

What happened - a bomb, a grenade flashing red. Metal floors sliding beneath his feet and then cold air around him turning achingly hot. Hair and sand in his mouth as blaster bolts ran out and another rebel soldier’s body crumpled over his own. Bodhi thinks he stood up by himself. The weight of heat and the smell of burning in his hand as he took, yes, took the rebel’s blaster and choked on an apology that couldn’t escape his throat. 

But those are just pieces. He doesn’t know what happened to take them out of Scarif and into hyperspace, only wet blood on his clothing and palm when he touched his heaving stomach. All of Bodhi’s questions weigh down in his lungs. The kind he can’t ask rushing doctors who sometimes twitch when they touch him, an instinctual fear, or maybe hate, for the title he had worn before Galen Erso’s facility. 

So he waits. Until the doors are pushed open wider than before, and a new bed slides in with all too familiar limbs arranged peacefully beneath the sheets. Chirrut breathes steady through his nostrils. Face twisted half to pain, the rest shadowed by Baze’s monolith of a body, the ever lurking shadow no nurse or doctor attempts to shoo away. Instinctively, Bodhi’s mouth falls open, and he snaps his teeth shut. He turns his eyes away as he wrings his hands and counts numbers that make little sense in his head no matter which pattern he tries. 

An outside clock strikes, and he feels his tongue betray him.

“What happened--” Bodhi says, eyes flashing to the soft press of forehead to forehead. Guilt, like an explosion in his heart, but his mouth feels numb and useless. “I don’t remember what- what happened. There was… a -a bomb, and the ship, and then we left but I don’t know what was between.”

He’s not sure what he expects. Silence is better than the empty nonsense in his head, and better than violence from a man pushed too far, so he takes it. Breathes through his rattling lungs as he counts the bandages on Baze’s body three times. He doesn’t feel any better about the damage. What bits of bacta are oozing from beneath fabric and medical tape make Bodhi’s stomach knot, and his nails dig into the backs of knuckles. 

Apologies live and die on his tongue when Baze suddenly straightens, a sigh rumbling through his chest as he turns in his seat. One new scar marks his lip. Small, and still shiny enough that it’s days old. If it pulls when he grimaces, Baze doesn’t seem to notice. Bodhi forces his eyes away. Up to Baze’s, but the weight immediately sends his gaze to the side, his spine growing cold. 

“Sorry-” He starts, and stops when Baze raises a hand.

“I don’t know much better than you.” That hand lowers, pushes stray hair from his face as his mouth curves downwards. “But you were out of the ship when I got there. Holding a blaster and scrabbling to get back inside. Some scald damage… Jedha was hit by those before and still stood. Nothing your ship couldn’t mostly survive.”

It’s the answer he wanted, yet missing too many parts for Bodhi to be fully happy. He exhales. Nods, until he feels dizzy and forces himself into stillness. Nothing that lasts when his hands are still touching, squirming against one another. They fall to grip the sheets and hold tight. 

“Flew us to get Cassian. And Jyn. Then out before we were swallowed by the entire planet. Spent half of the flight back trying to fix things and the other half laying down, once you figured out that there was shrapnel in your belly.”

Bodhi pauses at that. He follows Baze’s eyes down to the thick layer of bacta, the one so thickly layered it nearly obscures everything beneath. Never thought to look - but there it lies, an angry line turning bright red to sickly pink from his belly button downwards, angling right in an awful shape. He doesn’t remember that. Maybe pain. And the blood. But not the wound, nor any fear that should have come with it. 

He swallows.

“Oh.”

Part of him thinks he should have felt like a hero. But the rest of him just felt sick at the thought of some gilded title such as that.

##### \---

Bodhi’s scars are fainter now, but they still twinge when he slips through doors and brushes the shoulder of a bruised nurse. She shrugs off his arched eyebrow, the silent offer of concern with a press of fingers to shoulder, darting back to her work station. Patient confidentiality - and that was something to grow used to all those years ago, that his body was his own. Not a system categorized into broken and fixed parts for any wandering eyes to peruse and judge. The boy, he may not understand that yet. How his wounds are his, and his alone for as long as he’d like to keep them so. Maybe he’ll never fully understand it.

In the same way that, secretly, Bodhi thinks someone may read his yearly scans in public to the pilots that follow his guidance to death and back. 

Some fears never leave you. A target on your back for someone who knows the signs, be it good or bad. They lead Bodhi easily enough through beds empty or filled with rebels that spit fire at any doctor who comes near. One nurse with a bruise. Suspicious eyes to the left, a droid half arguing with the doctor that it chases. He finds, and pauses, by the only bed with a patient whose arguments seem less than good-natured. Who moves his hands in clenching fists, and then sinks them together, nails biting skin.

Bodhi slips a chair to the end of the bed and settles onto it with cracking joints. It’s less than subtle - he laughs, sharp and clean, as he sags into an uncomfortable metal back and meets the wide and faintly wild eyes of this boy. 

“Their medicine is better than when I was here decades ago.” He says, nodding towards the tubes coming from the boy’s back. “It was my legs, and I spent nearly a month in bed before they would let me walk. Your spine met a lightsaber, and you’re already sitting up.”  
There’s a faint flutter to the boy’s mouth. It softens him even more than the fat still clinging to his cheeks, the signs of _youth_ that he still, somehow, wears after all those years in the clutches of the First Order. Bodhi’s chest feels tight and loose all at once at the sight. 

“I never tried to escape. Partially because my friends were insistent I stay still and heal, no doubt the opposite of yours when, one day, he figures out how bored he is. ...And maybe partially because I couldn’t stand.”

The boy opens his mouth to speak, and then closes it, Reaches for the water besides him and swallows down an entire glass before the words come out, louder and far more curious than anything Bodhi had expected. “Why not? What happened to them?”

A shrug, before he bends down and slightly lifts one pant leg. Even now, the skin is pinker than the rest of him. Faint enough that some may never tell - but obvious, when you see it daily. The boy pauses, and then seems to recognize what he’s being shown. Bodhi drops his pant leg.

“It was a grenade. Hit from my feet all the way up to my hips, maybe a bit higher. I was luckier than I should have been, considering I was in my ship when it happened. Starships - they can resist grenades once or twice, but they turn into small furnaces with each one that goes off.”

“I’ve been in a ship that went down.” The boy says, slowly. “But not one that a grenade went off in.”

Bodhi hums. “I wouldn’t suggest it. Besides, I imagine the First Order has better grenades than the one that did this to me. Apparently the old ones were famous for going off early. Something none of us cargo pilots were told, of course, when transporting them from base to base.”

A flash in his eyes, as Bodhi barrels forward.

“If I had known, maybe I would’ve left earlier.”

“Left--”

“Defected.”

And, force, Bodhi isn’t sure he’s seen such a change in expression before. Softening and slacking features as eyes grow wide, fingers cut through bed sheets in the soft sound of ripping fabric that turns to white noise. He meets those eyes, unerring and calm as he can be. 

“Oh.” The boy says. Choking on whatever is meant to come next.

In return, he slides a hand out, lets it hang in the space between them. “Bodhi Rook. I’m the pilot.”

A wavering hand takes his in return. “Finn.” The boy - _Finn_ \- says, the words seeming more instinct than chosen. “I’m the stormtrooper.”

“Huh.” Bodhi shakes the boy’s hand and tries not to let his hand linger. Smiles. “No, I believe you’re much more than that.”

#### II.

When they release Finn, he’s granted a room just as small and utilitarian as all the rebel soldier’s rooms. A bed, a desk, a fresher, some storage for clothing and other items. Compared to rooms for admirals and generals (should they choose to bunk with the soldiers), they are closets with furniture, meant more for the act of sleeping than anything else. But it’s still something far more than Bodhi imagines Finn has ever seen before. Not lines of bunks without space for anything more than armor and underclothes. 

He watches, that first day, as Poe comes and goes with clothing either purchased or politely stolen from fellow rebels. How he manages to even make his gestures loud as he presents Finn with a poster of a film the boy has no doubt never seen, giving an explanation of empty walls being bad for the mind, and then cringing at his own rapid fire words. And Finn-

Finn grips the edge of his jacket, the one that Bodhi remembers belonging to the body besides him, and smiles with a growing confidence as he swats at Poe and chases after him when there’s clearly no good way to convince him to slow his rapid fire moving. It all looks very exciting. Like a good distraction - or even something that could wear out a body fresh from medical care. 

And still, hours later, he finds himself taking no chances. Bodhi slithers out from Cassian’s hands and leaves their bed when the first hour past midnight strikes. Their mutual warmth keeps him sleep soft as he drifts through empty hallways to the canteen. It’s a hollow space when vacant of all hungry souls, carved into stone like ribs from solid bone, where his steps echo no matter how softly he pads. Even the rustle of his hair is a snapping stick against the silence. No droid passes through, and after some moments, Bodhi enters the kitchen and begins to work. A large space meant for many bodies, with a window-like entry between canteen and kitchen that any may peer through. He works with his back to the window, and his spine, his shoulders a relaxed line. 

Five minutes gives him time aplenty to get water boiling, rolling itself into a fury of bubbles just before a new set of footsteps comes through the canteen door. They walk, stuttered, halfway through before Bodhi shifts his heel in a purposeful scrape. Swallowing the sound of boots coming to a halt, and the intake of breath that just barely lingers after. Eyes burrow into his back as he pushes his hair over his shoulder, and raises his other hand to gesture, just once. An invitation as open as it is hopeful. Long seconds pass. And then the door slides open, and steps too rigid for anyone other than a soldier come up to Bodhi’s shoulder.

“Sleeping in big rooms.” Bodhi says as he gathers tea leaves green and stiff into his palm, “is an experience you’ll get used to quicker than you think.”

“Yeah? You’d know.” Finn’s voice lacks any sharpness. It aches, with more than just the broken bones beneath the skin. 

Some wounds have to be passed over by doctors. They can’t fix everything, and medicine will never be able to touch the core of someone’s self no matter how hard it tries. 

Each leaf falls into the water and begins to bloom, as he turns the boil down to heat, but stay still. 

“Your friend, Poe, seems to think that you’d want to talk to an old man like me.” A smile almost disarming - perhaps more than than Bodhi would have wanted, as he drops crimson strands and curled bark after the leaves. “But I imagine whatever I say, they’ve already said to you. Maybe it’s my age that they think will make a difference. Please, the petals?”

Finn takes them automatically, and offers them to still hands. “Uh.” He says - looks down at the water and then back up. “You’re not that old. I mean - kriff, just. Do I put these in the water too?”

“All of them, if you would. We need something to balance the spice out.”

A second later, and the petals fall into water. Some cling to the bowl until they’re knocked in with prying fingers, swelling and inking their color as they sink to the bottom of the pot in a glistening mess. Bodhi hums deep in his throat as he slowly stirs the fluid. Bark and pods of spices bump into one another, scents slipping outwards through each bubble that bursts upon the surface. They make his stomach settle. That sorrow that never flees sends small aches through his heart that whisper names into the rhythm of his beating flesh. He tap - taps his spoon clean and sets it down upon the counter. 

Colors swirl, and steam makes his skin glisten with a soft sweat even as he leans back, motions Finn forward. Caution flashes. Fades. How hooked he seems, by the endless urge that comes with curiosity. Coming forward to lean his head above the pot and breathe in even as his skin begins to glisten, his eyes watering with the heat. 

“They’re right.” Finn says suddenly. Blurted into the tea as it steeps before he rears back, something like embarrassment coloring his cheeks. “I do -- I do want to talk to you. Everything is so new and you… You.”

Bodhi peers at him, and waits. Wasn’t it like this for him? Then? Even now, sometimes, stuttering and tripping when the words wouldn’t come. He’s has his reasons. Every single one is written in his brain like shards of broken glass, just as sharp on every neuron and wayward thought to cross through them as it could be on shaking fingers and delicate wrists.  
Sometimes, people would put words into his mouth. Impatience in the form of wanting to help, well hidden as a way to move forward for his sake, not theirs. Always theirs and never his. 

_Just wait,_ he wanted to scream. _Wait, let me have this, let me try to have this before you start to take it away._

“You’re sort of like me. I mean, you knew why I was here.” Finn’s hand moves in an aborted motion around them. Half-disguised by the slow plumes of steam between them. “And that the room is too big for me to sleep in alone.”

“Okay.” Bodhi says. “Let me strain this, and we can talk. Take a seat - anywhere on the floor, it’s much cozier here than with, well, all those empty tables.”

With some spills of tea on the countertops and steaming mugs of shifting colors, amber to green, both bodies slip onto the floor. Finn winces, a twinge in the shifting of his spine that matches each cracking and popping joint from Bodhi’s form. He seems off-kilter, unsure. But takes the second mug when offered, and raises it up for a breath in without hesitation. 

“You’ll burn yourself, so wait one, maybe two minutes.”

“Right.” A pause. “What is it?”

“Tea. A recipe that was common in my home, especially on birthdays. Usually,” Bodhi adds, “that is. But I was raised to make it in times of strain or need as well. To drink for the soul.”

Finn nods as he runs his fingers along the edge - collecting dew from steam and watching it drip down his palm. “Home. Jedha. You’re from Jedha, aren’t you.”

“I am.”

“And you defected.” Finn says, _repeats,_ as if convincing himself. “Because the Empire destroyed it.”

It gives him pause, to hear that rumor again. The reshape of his history, recoloring of the defector in a way that made him a martyr, a creature suffering and exacting vengeance for it. It arose after Hoth. Kept going for longer than the Empire lasted, until Bodhi felt driven mad by the repetition that gained him favored smiles and empathetic touches to his arms. _You defected because._ Not: _it happened, because._ Bodhi shakes his head on an axis. His fingers don’t tighten on his mug, not anymore, but the urge is present.

“No. No, that… started years ago. But it’s not the truth.” Bodhi says. “I defected to stop anything from being destroyed by the Death Star. But I failed. Maybe it was obvious who I would try to go to -- or maybe it was just because of what the city meant. I brought the message to rebels, and in return, Jedha was destroyed.”

Finn’s confusion doesn’t seem to fade. Instead more troubled, a twist of his mouth that he hides behind his drink. A slow sip that seems to soothe the furrow his brow ever so slightly, a flush rising in his cheeks and neck. 

“I don’t get it.” He says after a moment. “Why lie?”

“About me? Propaganda. It’s supposed to be harmless… painting a better light. Back then, we needed all the positivity we could manage. Times are desperate now, but the odds seem far more surmountable.”

A half-smile sticks to Bodhi’s face as he drinks from his own tea. He stretches his legs out before him - aching, sore already. What has age done to him if a solid floor makes him sore? Worry flashes across Finn as obvious as a wound, and he waves it away immediately. Patting a hand against one thigh where the muscles are just a bit less tense. 

“I’m just old. There’s no need for concern. When I was your age I would sleep curled up so tightly that every medic warned me that I was shortening my muscles.”

“Is that really possible?” Finn blurts out, eyes widening ever so slightly.

He laughs. “That, I don’t know. Honestly I think that they were paid to try and scare me into relaxing by my friends. See, those first months I would sleep in small places. Cockpits of ships, or under the wings, usually.”

Finn seems to be considering that - perhaps picturing him tucked into such small spaces, the ones where his head would have to be bent onto his knees until arising with such an ache in his neck that Bodhi couldn’t hope to fully raise his skull without pain. He makes a sound that could pass as acknowledgement, swallowed as it is under him setting his mug down, fingers on fingers once free enough to dig and shift together. A soldier like Finn wears callouses, yes, but the more Bodhi looks the more he realizes how minute they are. Some lines are scars, not signs of work. Instead the remnants of punishment for too many possible reasons that ricochet through his brain and beg him to ask. 

There was a time, years ago, when he would have done so and lived with the guilt of reawakening bad memories. Bodhi’s curiosity was his venom to give to others. An endless need to know why, what, and _how_ even if it could hurt the person being asked. He likes to think that maybe, he’s learned better. Enough to stay quiet with teeth gentle against his tongue, when Finn swallows. Raises himself up to meet eyes with eyes, and not grow tense all over.

“I’m used to there being a lot more bodies.” He says. Slower, more measured than anything else yet to leave him. “We bunked in barracks, at least… twenty five to a room, maybe more. Stacked on top of each other until there was barely enough room to get dressed or swing your legs out of the bed, you know? And now they give me this - this room, this big, huge, room and act like it’s next to nothing.”

A piece of skin rips from next to Finn’s thumbnail. Blood wells in the smallest of droplet within its place, smeared down by fingers and pressure until they stop slowly rising to the surface, glimmer beneath in bright ruby red instead. Between each motion, Bodhi shifts forward and takes a chance at the space between Finn’s palms. He carefully slips his own hand between them. It only takes a moment before Finn resumes his shifting, running fingers over foreign digits, nails half manicured and half stained beneath by oil, by grease. He traces the heart line - and when Bodhi laughs, he jumps just a bit at the sudden burst of sound.

But it leaves Finn wearing the ghost of a smile with a hint of white teeth. “It’s not nothing. It’s never been nothing, and I don’t think I can fix it with… ships. Or tight places.”

“You miss the breathing and shifting.” Bodhi guesses. “The signs of other living beings.”

“Yeah.” Finn’s shoulders slump, his fingers dig in just enough to make Bodhi’s teeth click. “I didn’t… imagine I would. We never even had names, but I miss them all.”

There are no words for a pain like that. His hand curves around Finn’s until his muscles strain against white knuckles and his skin grows hot with sweat. They sit like that, in a deadened silence broken only by the whispering of tea sloshing in mugs, their breath like soft whistles against the still air. Time will heal him, Bodhi thinks. Time and those around him, the girl gone and the boy here, if for now. And himself. Where every thread holding old wounds shut reach to tie into Finn’s own fresh stitches, a mind to mind, wavering heart to heart. He waits as the minutes creep past them and threaten to turn into hours. Hands move together in a slow sway, side to side. As the remnants of tea grow cold and congeal to the bottoms of cups abandoned besides their bodies.

Slowly Finn’s grip relaxes. He taps fingertips against Bodhi’s knuckles and smiles just a bit, as their palms grow still between them. 

“You know.” Bodhi says as his hand stretches - flexing each digit in a slow pattern. “There are people here who would share their room with you, if you asked them. Even tonight.”

The air rushes from between Finn’s lips. A faint pink to his cheeks as he shakes his head once, hesitates, and then does so again. 

“I don’t know.” He says, stilling. “Seems like a weird thing to ask from the people here.”

“From your friends.” Bodhi reminds him. 

“My friends.”

“That’s such a small thing to ask of a friend, Finn. It may not feel like such, but you’ll be fine. Just fine. And no one will be sore with you. Only if you wish to,” He speaks and spreads their matched fingers wide - better fitting their hands together. “I would suggest you go to one of them and ask.”

“And what, share a bed?” Finn sounds almost amused, despite the furrow in his brow.

“Or have them help in grabbing your mattress and dragging it through the halls.”

A startled laugh - and Bodhi shrugs in response, grinning down at his knees. There’s a bit of history behind that idea, the kind that he keeps secret beyond the light in his eyes, and the twitching of his mouth doesn’t fade quickly when he finally looks back up. Despite all slow exhaustion, the humor between defectors stays alive for longer than it possibly should. Finn squeezes his hand before retreating away, grabbing for his mug as he stands. A clock above them cries out yet another hour has passed. 

Plasticine thunks against metal. When Finn straightens, there’s a running of confidence under his skin.

“Alright. I don’t know how much mattress dragging I’ll be doing, but I think I can sleep.” He pauses. He throws Bodhi a half smile as he begins to stand up, sending out a hand to catch under his arm and help him steady onto two aching legs. “I’m giving out information tomorrow, so. Sounds like a better idea than staying up all night, huh.”

“Oh, yes. You’ll be in there for hours, I doubt anyone will see you again for the entire day. Repetition, questions, refreshing and repeating until you can hardly speak. Good luck, Finn. You might need it.”

Finn’s laughter echoes even after his footsteps have faded, a bright shock in the twilight.

#### III.

Intelligence meetings and deep flights into space keep them apart for awhile. But when they flash by one another, Finn seems to grow with every day and shifting second. Not physically, only in the confidence that burns out of his pores. It has him wearing bars that stand simply for ‘Resistance’ beneath his jacket with a radiating pride. It suits him, Bodhi decides. Says as much to Leia over choppy reports of the First Order’s lingering on Jakku. She grins with her teeth, sharp and brittle and full of the memories of a wild life at war. Above lie distant eyes.

“He’s earned it. That, and a hell of a lot more than we can give him.”

That thought lingers with Bodhi. It lurks with him until the day that Rogue Squadron is undertaking repairs, and Finn pauses in the hanger entryway with a blankness on his face. He shifts his legs out in front of him, stretching from ankle up, and tilts his head to peer over at Finn. Pursed lips release a clean whistle, drawing a twitch from the boy, wide eyes meeting his own and eyebrows raising.

A single hand waves him over. 

“Yeah?” Finn says - his voice vaguely distant. “Yeah, what’s up.”

“Are you busy?”

It’s a polite question, even when the answer is obvious. But he seems to appreciate it anyway, softening a bit around his edges as he shakes his head jerkily, left and right. 

“Alright.” Bodhi says. Shakes his head until his braid flicks and the bottom hair tie almost slips all the way free. “My hair is loose. Would you like to learn how to braid it?”

Finn pauses. Turns his eyes to his hands, and then to the loose, almost uncomfortable looking braid lumped and twisted by the work of an exhausting day. His agreement comes suddenly, seeming to surprise himself as much as it does Bodhi. They both pause - and laugh, a bit, when their eyes meet in mutual shock. 

“I didn’t mean to say that.” He admits once a moment has passed.

“Honestly, I didn’t think you’d agree at all, let alone so quickly.” Bodhi replies. “Do you want to change your mind?”

As he speaks, he takes out his braid anyway. The tie holding it together resting in one palm as he twists his neck slowly, hair like waves with the faintest of tangles against his skull falling over both shoulders. 

Immediately, Finn shakes his head no, and steps closer. Moving to sit on the crates behind Bodhi - warm with sunlight and uncomfortable in the ridges that push up and place him at an angle that digs into his bones. It’s something awful, Bodhi knows. Offers Finn a distraction in the form of the used hair tie and another, dark and well used when Finn wraps his fingers around them. He holds them loosely. More a motion out of memory than purpose, only tightening when Bodhi clears his throat, pushes his hair to fully fall along his spine.

He wants to ask. Oh, does he want to ask, like a knot in his throat. Keeping it down almost aches inside.

“Alright.” Bodhi says instead. “Tie my hair into a back ponytail - so, low, sort of laying along where the roots of my hair naturally end, but a bit higher. Yes, just like that.” 

A small shake of his head confirms it, tight and holding against the weight of his own hair. 

“Now separate one part of my hair from the rest. About… eh.” He holds up two fingers and judges the space between them before showing Finn. “About that. The rest needs to be close, but don’t mix the two sections. Okay? Now, separate that section into three.”

Under the white noise of boots and mechanical jargon, Bodhi’s voice continues a slow rhythm of steps with his eyes closed. Following the tug of his hair for guidance. They slow when Finn asks. Pause when his hands are a bit sore, or clumsy, and he needs to go back in steps or perhaps rest for a moment. There’s little pain, for a beginner. Only the rare tug that makes him hum and tilt his head back for relief in a single second of motion. Finn learns. Grows steadier with the twisting of hair, until his own voice runs over Bodhi’s in the rhythm that he’s spoken, murmuring it beneath his own breath to the beat of his moving fingers. 

By the time he reaches the end, he’s fallen silent. He pinches hair together until he can twist the tie into place, hands shifting up fast enough that a small brush of hair hits Bodhi’s neck and makes him pause. 

“Does it look good?”

“I think… I think it does.” Finn replies. His voice is clearer and brighter now. “Is it done?”

“Almost. Take a small section of the loose hair and wrap it around the top hair tie, then tuck it into itself. That will hold until I can pin it in place.”

Bodhi’s barely finished speaking before it’s done, eager hands giving a small tug on the braid once permission is given to check its strength. Little shifts. Without a mirror or wandering fingers, even Bodhi can tell its structure. Wears his pride in a quirk of mouth when he stands, pops the vertebrae in his back by the bare motion.

“When your friend returns, you can do this to her hair. A temple braid is what we called it. ...For respect to the Force, and the Temple of the Whills.” 

“She’ll like that.” Finn says. “For the Force, huh. Yeah. She’ll like that a lot.”

He blinks his eyes rapidly, and then looks back at Bodhi. 

There’s a clarity to them, readable in the very way that he breathes. Bodhi recognizes it like his own hands, wears the same stress in the line of his spine and the way that Finn’s heels are touching, almost to trip himself up if he tries to go anywhere too fast. His hand falls onto Finn’s shoulder, and squeezes. _Feel better?_ He thinks.

Instead: “Well done.” Is what he says.

“Yeah,” Finn answers - rolling his shoulders as he looks Bodhi’s hair over again. “Guess I’m a natural, huh? Maybe I can practice on Pava. Or on the new security guard near my room. Do you think -- do you think the General would let me?”

His voice grows with excitement, and Bodhi lets it wash over him, comforting as the weight of braided hair against his back.

#### IV.

Over the years, Bodhi has begun to carry things from other people. Emotional, mental parts of other living beings tucked beneath his own skin as though he can keep them alive, in his own way. He scrawls barely legible attempts at poetry in Jedhan for his mothers, on paper that costs him far too much, into lines that are never again seen. What muscles are beneath his skin thanks to Baze, the man who became war as much as he hated it, and shed himself of the darkness before it was his time. They will never match in skill. But Bodhi tries, can keep his own in many fights, and has won enough that his heart keeps beating. 

For Chirrut, there are particular words when the nightmares come from a different place than Saw Gerrera’s hideout and make him tremble in a way that feels better than wanting to crawl out of his own mind. When his fists are knotted in sheets and his skin is cold with sweat, he begins. In mind, sometimes. Oozing out of his mouth when he can speak without the risk of bile. 

_I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me._

This is, in a way, how those remaining from Rogue One do their best to keep Chirrut with them. Murmured to one another or alone, or sometimes all together. Wide awake or groggy with sleep and struck by a tongue that will barely obey them. Bodhi has had the words pushed against him, and returned the favor when it was his turn. They are of religion. But have nothing based in belief of something unknown. What their friend created his chant for may or may not have bearing for the soul hearing or saying it - it is the man who made it that brings their heart rates and breathing down. 

He thinks that Chirrut would have thought it the same, nonetheless. That the Force gave him to them. Honoring him was just honoring what brought them together, in the end. 

Years have made Bodhi a sentimental sort of fool. With the words on his lips the very moment that he hears rapid breathing, too fast and loud for even a closed door to keep swallowed down from an otherwise empty hallway. He rocks in place, for a moment. A small plaque besides the door reads FINN in small black letters against silver, and the light is marked green. For anyone to enter. Maybe an oversight. Or maybe someone else is coming - Finn is hoping someone else will come, and left it as an invitation. 

Teeth worry against his lower lip before Bodhi moves forward and raps upon the door just once. It slides open on presence, but the knock is a warning. All the manners that he can manage before he finds himself stepping inside, towards the hunched and jerking figure tearing into the seat of the desk chair. He sets his mug on the desk. Drags the nearest chair over, dropping into it with just a few inches between their legs. 

Finn heaves through his teeth, and doesn’t seem to notice. Choking on spit, on his own gut wrenching sobs and the very air that whistles back and forth through a runny nose. He’s almost hyperventilating. What air does enter barely stays before it flies back out, stuttered when Finn rubs at his nose. Tries to keep his lips pressed into a line in an attempt at soothing that lasts a second, before another sob bursts them apart. Bodhi can hardly think anything, other than that he looks ready to explode with whatever he’s kept knotted inside of himself for so long. 

“Hey.” He says, voice just barely louder than the incoherent noises that Finn is making. “Hey, little one, I’m here to help you. I’m going to touch you - and if you don’t want me to, just push me away, okay? You don’t have to let me.”

What looks like a nod is his answer, jerky and lost in the rocking of bones and the shaking of head to something that Bodhi cannot see, smell, or hear. He moves slow. Taking Finn’s hands into his own, fingers curving slightly around wrists, thumbs rubbing a pattern back and forth into the softness besides Finn’s own thumbs and pointer fingers. The vibration of blood-boiling anxiety shakes even there, until the loosest pressure keeps them both steady, hands between one another’s knees when Finn leans forward, choking and gagging for a moment. 

“I know.” Bodhi says, squeezing his hands. “I know. If you need to, let it go. Don’t worry about any mess.”

Finn tries to speak, but it doesn’t come out as much. Just a gurgle and a choking cough, oxygen catching in his lungs as he bends further and then throws himself back, a sharp beginning to rapid fire rocking motions. Taking teeth to tongue to stop Bodhi from summoning words like anxiety and panic attack, things dangerous when you live in the shadow of insurmountable terror. Stutter, stumble, be punished or die. There is little room for movement with the smaller ranks that train easy and fill easier. 

_Helpless_ is not a feeling that Bodhi will ever get used to. Untethered in the fear and grief of another, where you are anchoring for another, yet lost by yourself all at once. He doesn’t shake like he did anymore. Now he feels keenly aware of every twitch or tremble, the very quake of lungs when Finn sucks in air through short choppy heaves that hiccup around between his teeth. 

“Sssshhh.” He murmurs, a wound in the back of his throat when he speaks. “Come around, Finn. I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me. I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me. I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me.”

It’s a droning sort of repetition, where the words threaten to blur into one another on the tail end of Bodhi’s pauses for breath, for swallowing. He sets his words to the rhythm of his hands over Finn’s. In return matching his rocking, a pace bordering on far too rapid. On broken breaths come the halting attempts Finn makes to echo him. One or two words of manta that break into another one, strangled and low (like names, like _orders_ and _please_ ) until they become incomprehensible. 

“I can’t breathe-” He spits out, after choking on air, spittle on his lips. “I can’t, I can’t--”

“I know. Breathe in. I am one with the Force. Breathe out. And the Force is with me. Just like that, Finn, just like that.”

“O--kay, okay… okay--”

He doesn’t count the minutes, because they inevitably drag into an hour, and pass even that number by. Time has no hold on the flaring fear that Finn wears in his eyes, and the jolting of his stomach against the soft shirt he wears. That fear, this panic, is a systematic pain that they share and will never fully free themselves from. Bodhi sees it, now, in a striking realization that he will never be able to take it away from Finn. He doesn’t think he’s wanted much more than to free the boy shaking apart and drawing back together before him from everything inside, every trauma that wants to tear him apart. 

All that he has is his voice. Bodhi keeps strength within every word with the grit of his teeth, rocking in measure with Finn as their foreheads touch, the boy’s breathing stutters and slows into a rhythm that matches Bodhi’s just a little bit more. 

“I’m one with the Force.” He whispers.

Finn frees a hand to rub at his eyes, throat croaking, voice reedy yet strong. “And the Force is with me.”

#### V.

Though General Organa does take to testing Finn’s skills, it’s not an event for the eyes of pilots who work with the skies more than blasters and field tactics. Bodhi receives news of it only through the voices of those invited to go, Major Ematt in particular nearly vibrates with an excitement he hasn’t shown in many years. Life, it seems, has been brought back single handedly to those of them weary and aching. Finn wears hope in the ways that patron saints and whispers of Jedi did for generations long passed. One soul capable of taking a lifetime of conditioning, and stripping himself to the most base instincts no brainwashing nor pain could take away. He has done what every soldier and senator must have convinced themselves to be impossible. A captain, an _officer_ of the First Order in whatever way it was considered, thought for himself and lived to actively tell his tale. 

It reminds Bodhi of some years ago, when those old enough to keenly remember the clones in white uniforms gathered together some nights and wondered if any tried to rebel. What mental capacity they had - and how far it would take them in terms of free thought, before reprogramming or execution brought them back to their knees. The sorrow of lives taken could only become real in those quiet moments. Convincing yourself that most of your kills were soulless shells, cruel and cheap an excuse as it was, made it easier to sleep without your hands shaking at night. For they agreed that it was unlikely. No dark shadow like the Empire would make soldiers who had a chance of carrying their own minds. Those were people in body, and not in mind. No more alive than the liquor old rebels with abscesses beneath their scars would swallow down on nights without active duty. 

Those were easy memories to let slip aside with age and new worries. Yet, now, they arise again. Pressing at the back of Bodhi’s mind as he wonders about the wounds each young soldier and bright-eyed pilot hides. They fight the same uniforms, and could no doubt easily pretend the same bodies hid beneath as the ones their mothers and fathers had killed. All before Finn arose from the ashes on Jakku to finish a mission marked as ‘failed’ in the Resistance’s files. Crushing his helmet beneath his heels and screaming into the heavens that he was real, alive, that he was more than cannon fodder for a war machine. Screaming, until everyone in that battle with ears had a chance to hear him. 

He was not a mask and a blaster. Nor was he just FN-2187, squad leader and First Order soldier. Now he was Finn, who rescued Poe Dameron of the Resistance, completed his top secret mission, and assisted in the destruction of Starkiller Base. Soon those who invited him to show his abilities before them will let him unleash his knowledge among the other soldiers, and he will be known as a swath of information, the man who can without hesitation tell them all weaknesses in stormtrooper armor and weapons. Every pattern he learned for squads and battles, anything pushed into his mind for every year of his life. Men and women of the resistance will take what he can tell. Use it to shoot down ships, break up troopers into swaths easier for cutting down beneath their blasters, and blow bases of operations sky-high for the First Order to see from systems away. 

Yet at night: will they wonder if those soldiers they killed had the same spark that Finn had? Helplessly think over the ones who might have been ready to flee, to defect, and join the Resistance? They aren’t faceless anymore. Not when your mind has time to dwell on who might have been behind the mask, and if they were undoing the programming of their mind to find freedom once and for all. Nameless enemies are easy. And Finn, for good as well as whatever darkness may come with it, has given the concept of an enemy with a name into every Resistance mind. 

None of them deserve that. Not their pilots. Not their soldiers. And definitely not Finn, who could have never known what one strike of terrifying bravery might unfold throughout the galaxy as a whole. 

It makes his head throb and his heart ache to even consider. There have always been some things that Bodhi’s bleeding heart wanted to keep from those too young for the fight, yet dragged into another war. His hands shake when he thinks too deeply on it. Keeping them busy only works for so long. And with Cassian gone, left early in the morning with two others, only a kiss on the Bodhi’s mouth as a wordless goodbye, it’s gotten even worse. They cannot stay here forever. Not with the First Order keenly aware of where their base is, Starkiller dead or otherwise. And Cassian has leads. He thinks, resigned, that his only sorrow it not having been able to introduce Finn to the Resistance’s head of intelligence. To his husband. 

_Keep it in your mind, mi corazón, until I’m back._ Cassian had said into his hair. _Look forward to it._

He’s wizened with age, but his heart has gotten softer with every passing year. But then again, he was never good at steeling his heart against much of anything. A hand rubs over his face as he rocks upright and takes to the nearest pathway. The paths are long, winding, hugging the base before cutting into the woods around them, embodying the very purpose D’qar was chosen all those years ago for the Resistance to truly grow. He’s proud to have been there from that moment onwards. Organa knew him and his husband enough and the fire they still carried for the galaxy’s safety. There is, Bodhi thinks, no way that they could deny waiting, in some small part of themselves, for her to summon them to arms once again.  
As consequence, he knows most of these pathways. Ones well worn and ones barely visible through underbrush, though this is far more of the former. A slow quarter mile has him walking with younglings rushing by, their boots a stampede as they salute him, and a few braver ones wave with such blatant enthusiasm that Bodhi has to curb the urge to laugh. It takes, however, another quarter mile for the back of the base to be behind him and for him to realize that the sound of rushing boots is heading for and not past him. Bodhi hesitates. He rests a hand on his hip as he turns to come face to face with Finn, breathing sharp but grinning so large that his eyes have crinkled dramatically. 

“I’ve been looking--” He bursts, careless for his breathing, “everywhere for you.”

“Ah, so it’s happened.” Bodhi replies instinctively, solemnly. “You’ve replaced me as admiral, and Leia cannot stand to give the bad news herself.”

“What? Wh- no, no! I finished -- I did what they wanted. Used weapon after weapon, you know, everyone was watching.” Finn starts, and pauses. Blinks before he straightens and grunts at the crack in his spine. “Were you going somewhere?”

“Just walking. It’s for my legs, keeps me from degenerating. But come - walk with me, keep talking. You’re about to vibrate out of your skin!”

“Well, it’s news.” Finn answers, gummy smile as he takes off besides the older man. There is no lie in Bodhi’s words -- he is vibrating, so much so that he all but jogs off, meeting and overtaking Bodhi’s slower walk within seconds. It takes him a moment, realization and then turning back around, a sheepish grin on his face that matches the pink of his cheeks.

Despite all twists in his belly, Bodhi laughs loud and clean. 

“Here.” He says, offering out his arm. “Now I can’t lose you. What’s the news - are you actually taking over my role as Admiral?”

“No!” Gently, Finn shoves him - but keeps him from going too far with their locked arms. “It’s better than that, much better. General Organa was impressed by my skill with blasters, right, and so she gave me some old mission data of ground work you guys had done against the First Order. Kind of like Poe on Jakku, but more soldiers.”

“Mhm.” 

They push into the edge of the forest, hot sun fading its oppressive, smothering heat beneath stretched bows of glistening leaves. Finn hardly pauses, though he’s made it clear that warm, green planets are as strange to him as they were to Rey. He seems blind to the world around him, eyes barely flashing away from Bodhi and then only to the ground, checking for roots and the wayward rocks that nearly trip them up every few feet.

“You guys did good. I’d never mean you didn’t, the Resistance is incredible. But there were some moments in the reports that could’ve gone differently, and she wanted me to point them out, you know.” Finn says, shifting from leg to leg between each step. “I just -- did what she asked! And they seemed impressed, they must’ve been I guess because, get this--”

And he stops them, nearly hopping now as he grabs at Bodhi’s free arm, seeming ready to shake him for a moment before he pauses, laughs again, and shakes his head.

“They want to make me a captain!”

Bodhi blinks once, twice, before his cheeks feel set to bursting with a smile. Immediately his arms part and Finn moves between them, clutching as tightly as he’s held. Force - he had expected something for Finn, but not so much. Wildly, Bodhi’s mind rethinks the small smiles and dismissive hums that Leia had given him when their conversations turned back to their new defector, and he feels set to break with the laughter bubbling in his throat. Clever. She’s always been so clever, their princess; this must have been her plan from the beginning. 

All those meetings that Bodhi wanted to try and prove Finn to her, and she was already convinced. _Of course_ she was.

“I’m proud of you.” He says, stepping back. “Their trust isn’t misplaced, Finn, you deserve this. Good job.”

Rocking from the balls of his feet to his heels, Finn shakes himself out as it to scare away the excess energy in his form. It doesn’t work. He’s still shifting, hopping, shaking with it when Bodhi’s hand is on his back, forcing them to walk again. 

“Just wait, your friend may be with Skywalker, but when she comes back you’ll already outrank her.” He says, just for the laugh that it earns him. “But now Poe can, officially, boss you around, I’m afraid.”

“That’s fine.” Finn replies. “That’s great! I’m just -- glad.”

Bodhi nods. A role means belonging. Not just hanging onto coattails and existing as the question mark of what’s supposed to be done with you - they know, very well, who Finn is, and what he’s meant to do. Someone else who will give his blood and teeth for the health of the galaxy. Or… at least, with Finn, perhaps it’s the health of his friends that matters most. 

They all have that selfishness in them. It’s what keeps the resistance alive, Republic or no Republic backing them.

“Had me do paperwork.” Finn is saying, when Bodhi’s attention returns. “So I can get paid, and be in their system officially. My medical files have been floating this whole time.”  
“Annoying, isn’t it? I’ve never enjoyed paperwork.”

“It wasn’t too bad. A lot of it I didn’t know, but. I guess it’ll come. Had to choose a last name though.” Finn pauses here. Jitters - and not with the same energy. This makes his cheeks flush and his ears burn so vividly that Bodhi swears they may quite literally catch flame.

His mama would’ve said that it looked like a duinuogwuin set fire to his extremities. Usually while pinching them.

Bodhi, far from his mother in public embarrassment, simply tugs on Finn’s arm in a rapid beat until the boy crumbles and gives up the obvious answer sitting, waiting on the very tip of his tongue.

“I put down Dameron.” He says. “Without asking. The General didn’t say anything but she did smile a bit, and now… Now I need to tell him. Kriff, I didn’t think about that, what is he going to say? What if he’s angry?”

With a hum, Bodhi buys himself time. Remembers when he added to his last name, and how Jyn had grinned at him, Chirrut had smelled the chances for gentle teasing like a loth cat smells blood, and Baze had simply clapped a hand onto his shoulder. It was an easy change, with the universe in flux, but it was an important one. That mattered. Having no name to add onto, no name to change or switch, that’s different. Almost unfathomable. Bodhi is shaking his head before he realizes it.

“He’ll be flattered.” Comes the assurance, squeezing Finn’s wrist when he tries to argue. “Trust me, Finn Dameron, I’ve known Poe since he was a little thing clinging to his mother’s leg, and he’ll be beyond flattered. Maybe say it out loud enough times to make you dizzy, maybe joke that you haven’t given him a ring yet. But that’s all.”

“I still should’ve asked.” Finn replies, his deflation quickly changing into a small, shy smile.

“And force him to give you his blessing?” Bodhi snorts. “Poe prefers things sprung on him so he can react, not make preemptive decisions. At most you’ve trapped yourself into a celebration with all of our squadrons. If so, I hope the Force is merciful enough to keep your head mostly free of pain.”

“It won’t be that bad.” Finn says. Hesitates. “Will it be that bad?”

“Good authority.” He says firmly. “Poe takes his drinking seriously when there are ten other pilots threatening to unseat him and take his pride, which means he’ll demand you act as his wingman.”

Finn snickers, stepping up a larger step and turning around to take most of Bodhi’s weight in his clutching hands. If he has questions, he doesn’t ask. Just waits until Bodhi has finished adjusting his braid to offer out his arm, and continue.

“I think I belong here. Like the rest of you do, I feel… peaceful.” Finn says, after a moment. 

Bodhi is glad to be free from his eyes, if only to blink away the sudden rise of weight in his throat. “You do. Anyone who wants a place with us has it. For as long as they want to remain. Which, for you, could be a week or forever. Depending on if you survive that party -- which I’m willing to bet is waiting for you right now in your room, if you’d like to go face it.”

Immediately, Finn makes no reply. When Bodhi looks his eyes are upwards, where leaves of deep greens rustle with pastel sproutlings from new branches, dripping small droplets of dew every few inches. He glances right, when ferns rustle, and a bird breaks free. She clutches something in her beak as she flies over their heads and into the labyrinth of branches above. A moment later, she sings, mouth free of her meal and belly bulging. Finn’s breath catches in his throat, before he clears it, swallows loud enough to be heard.

“Let’s stay here.” He says, face soft with youth and eyes wide. “Just for a little bit longer.”

Bodhi squeezes his arm again. 

“However long you want.”

#### +I.

A watch on his wrist says 0100 hours, and Bodhi Rook doesn’t know where he is. Some part of him wants to argue - but it’s drowned beneath an ocean of panic, a feeling in his boots of metallic pressure and the ringing in his head as he walks down hallways. He takes turns to more spaces he can’t recall having seen before. It’s not good. Eadu was small and his ship was smaller but this is neither, nor is it the heat of Jedha, the shade of a towering temple that he could take shelter under while waiting for his contact. 

This is dark, deep, and smells like the earth. Bodhi has never been in a place like this since selling his morals away for a paying job. 

He feels sick. Repeats his statement in his head as he hits a corner with his shoulder and winces, shuddering at the pain and the way that his legs nearly buckle. How long has he been walking? It wasn’t 0100 when he first started, that’s for certain. An hour. Hours? Without finding where the ships are kept so that he can move on, do his mission, Galen Erso is trusting him and he can’t find his way out of a building that just grows with every step he takes. Bodhi shivers. He reaches for his goggles, and comes away empty handed. Nails to palm as he pushes on a door and heaves a breath when it doesn’t open. 

_I have a message for Saw Gerrera. I’m the pilot. I defected. Galen Erso sent me to see Saw Gerrera._

“What?” A voice says, and Bodhi leaps.

Nearly falls when he spins around, an ache in both legs that makes his back hit the door and sag there, chest heaving against his clenched hands. The boy doesn’t look unfriendly. Dressed in sleep clothes and blinking owlishly as if he’s just arisen, from a door that slides shut ten feet down, no doubt. He’s barefoot. Padding closer to offer out a hand, and freezing when Bodhi presses himself further away from it. 

“Uh. Are you okay?” The boy asks, and Bodhi shakes his head until his neck hurts.

“No.” He says. “Yes. No -- I have a mission, and it’s urgent. I need to find--”

His stomach flares and he looks around them for voices or silhouettes, before staring back at the boy again.

“I need to find _Saw Gerrera._ ” Bodhi hisses, feeling his molars clench and grind together as his heels shift. He rocks onto the balls of his feet to whisper into this boy’s space. “It’s very, very important. Do you understand? I have to find him -- I have information. Something important from Galen Erso regarding a weapon that the Empire is making.”

A planet killer, a Death Star, literal and beastly, what he had helped for so many years without knowing, fed the guilt in his chest until he planned to take his ship up, aim it, crash it. Maybe hit an empire base while he was at it to make sure, just absolutely sure, that he could die knowing some part of his life wasn’t worthless. He wrote a message to his mothers that he knew they would never see, draining him until he abandoned it upon his datapad, fled for the shipyard, and -- 

And Galen Erso had access to anything written on any datapad in Eadu. He, the director, the one everyone expected to be the most dedicated of them all, caught Bodhi’s wrist and invited him to tea before his suicide run. At the risk of his own skin, he trusted a pilot he had never met with the most sacred information galaxy-wide, and here he was, horribly, helplessly lost. Staring into the eyes of a boy who looks confused beyond all measure, looking to the side, and then at the door behind Bodhi. 

“Saw Gerrera.” The boy repeats. “A message from… Galen?”

“Yes. Yes! Please, you must help me - you are… you are Rebellion, right?” Bodhi croaks, cold in his belly now, trying to back away and finding no space.

Immediately the boy nods. “Yeah. Uh -- Resistance, we…” He cuts off. Twists his mouth to the side, and then holds out a hand. “Hey, this isn’t a conversation to have against Ramos’ bedroom door. Let’s go somewhere quiet to talk, okay?”

Bodhi can barely breathe, but he nods. Half collapses into the boy’s hand and lets him take much of his weight, shame in his chest as he walks on legs that shake with aching so deep even the bones hurt. He tries to hide his wincing. Fails, if the worry he’s looked at says anything. More and more of his weight is taken from his legs until he’s almost drifting above the floor, curved into the boy’s ribcage. 

“What message do you have?” He asks, and Bodhi shakes his head.

“It’s for Saw Gerrera.” Is repeated, sharp and stubborn. 

“Yeah.” The boy agrees. “But if I’m getting you to him, I need to know what it is, right? So what’s the message?”

And -- that makes sense. How else do they know it’s not a trick? Bodhi shakes his head, nods, and nods until his braid is half undone down his back, a motion he can’t fully figure out how to stop.

“It’s about a weapon. The -- the planet killer, the death star. Galen Erso has a way for it to be stopped, but I have to get the message to the rebellion, do you understand?”

The boy grunts, his face twisting a bit as he waves a door open and helps Bodhi inside. It’s… a medical ward. Dark and earthy as the rest of the building, but with medical equipment everywhere, a body rising and falling with breath in the farthest corner, covered in tubes. He feels numb. Stumbling over to the nearest bed, he doesn’t argue as the boy gently lowers him onto it. Then he pulls himself to sit at Bodhi’s side.

“Your name,” The boy says after a moment, “is Bodhi Rook, right?”

“Yes, how --”

“And you’re a pilot.”

“Yes, but how--”

“Bodhi.” He sounds firm, but gentle. It cuts through Bodhi’s panic, leaves him heaving for breath and shaking as the boy puts his hands over Bodhi’s own and squeezes. “Bodhi, you gotta listen to me, okay? I don’t understand what’s going on, but you already delivered that message.”

And for some moments, all that Bodhi hears is his ears ringing. Dizzy and aching, he leans back, rocks forward, nauseous in his very lungs as he heaves for breath and tries to pull away, bring his knees up, run if he can. All he can manage is --

“That’s not possible.”

“I know. I know, but it is. You delivered your message, okay? And the Death Star, it got destroyed by Luke Skywalker, who’s a Jedi. You were in a medical ward when it happened. Got your legs burned on Scarif, remember? You told me it was a bomb in your ship, but you and your ship survived it. And then you flew everyone out.” The boy pauses. Looks down at their hands, then up, with a faint smile. “Because you’re the pilot.”

“...The message. Is delivered.” Bodhi croaks. “I’m the pilot and. I delivered the message?”

“Yeah.” The boy -- and he knows his name, but it’s just out of reach -- nods. “Yeah you did.”

Bodhi closes his eyes, and rests his head on the metal bars framing the end of the bed. There’s thought, but it’s not reachable. Incoherent like puzzle pieces being smashed together in shards and messes of color, sometimes making sense in flashes like faces, names, or a feeling that rushes through him white hot and leaves just as quickly. Bodhi rides it, but barely keeps hold of himself. Somewhere, deeper in his head -

_I’m Bodhi Rook, I’m the pilot, and I delivered the message. I’m Bodhi Rook, I’m the pilot--_

When he does open his eyes, they ache enough that he has to force them fully wide. His breathing his a whistle through his nose as he slowly rocks back up, spine cracking, head throbbing with pain that he knows, _knows_ won’t leave him for some time. The room makes more sense now. It’s medical. From the Resistance. Where he held Poe’s hand and visited at his request, another defector. 

“Finn.” Bodhi rasps out. 

“I’m here.” Finn answers, immediate as he wraps his arms around Bodhi and pulls them closer together. He doesn’t comment on the wetness on his shoulder, nor the shaking through Bodhi’s muscles and bones. Instead he does all he can: holds on, and refuses to let go. “It’s alright, Bodhi, I’m here.”

**Author's Note:**

> \- The tea that Bodhi makes for himself and Finn is a Pakistani tea called kahwah, which is delicious.  
> \- Similarly, the 'temple braid' that Finn learns to do is called a ladder braid, and is from Pakistani and Indian culture. As far as I'm concerned, Jedha's culture took heavy influence from Pakistan, India, China, and Thailand and therefore I've added these to symbolize that.  
> \- I've vaguely referenced, so that it's up to the reader, the personal canon of myself and a friend that after Shara Bey's passing, Cassian and Bodhi became Poe's guardians at her written final request. It's up to you, however, to see it that way or as traditional canon!
> 
> Come yell at me about Star Wars on my tumblr, jedhaboy.tumblr.com until I write more than just 500 word ficlets and have something else to post here.


End file.
